When you're bringing in a product line, whether it's a new store procuring its first order, or a new store expanding into a new product category, you have to consider where your critical mass lies for that inventory level. If you want to add anime to your product offering, you can't just put 8 DVDs on the shelf and wait to see what happens. You have to add a certain amount of inventory before it begins to earn its shelf space.

Critical mass refers to the quantity of product you have on the shelf. When you reach a certain inventory level, sales dynamics change. Instead of being a waste of money on dead inventory, people start to notice. They talk to each other about it. They ask your crew about it. They pick it up and handle it. Most importantly, they buy it.

The "Mass" Part

It's about more than just quantity, although quantity is the easiest thing to measure. It's easy to talk about $5,000 worth of inventory, or 200 SKUs, or 40 linear feet of product. Those things can be counted. All things being equal, $5,000 worth of Games Workshop minis is probably closer to reaching critical mass than $3,500 worth of GW.

The Other Parts

Professional merchandising matters, too. That means your shelves should look full, even when they're not. Some retailers think that having empty spots on the wall makes it look like product's selling. Maybe it does to you, but to your customers, it looks like you can't afford to restock, or that product's selling so poorly that you don't bother to restock it.

Likewise, your inventory shouldn't look like a pile of yard trash. Keep everything straightened and in the right place. Patrol your shelves for misplaced product regularly and put stuff back where it belongs. If packaging is shopworn, liquidate it according to your normal procedures, whether that means marking it used and putting it in that section or clearing it out on eBay.

Any new or expanded product line needs advertising to support it. Whether you advertise primarily to existing customers or you (more wisely) deliver the message to potential new customers through TV, the newspaper, direct mail, convention flyers, or whatever, if you don't advertise it, your sales suffer at any inventory level.

An Example Begins

Let's say you want to carry something basic. You run a small store and do well with CCGs and the cherry-picked Games Workshop minis you stock. You carry D&D, but only the core books and the recent titles. You dominate your local market in the cards and do well with GW, but you think that you'd compete better by establishing your position as THE local RPG store.

You could add the core books of, say, 20 different games. That's a cost of about $300 to $350. Your investment is small, but you're almost certain to lose it. The problem is that people who play those games probably have the core book already. If not, they're not seeing anything on your shelves to convince them that they should buy it from you. You'll see some minor sales-certainly better than the zero sales you previously had in that category.

If you leave this situation like it is, you'll probably end up dumping it after a year or so. Many of the games you have on the shelf at the end of the year will be the original copies you placed there when you began this experiment. If you place this product spine out, it doesn't make a very positive impression on the customer. It's less than two feet across. It's easy to miss entirely, and a browser can scan from end to end in a minute or two. You might see $1,500 to $4,000 in sales if you're lucky. That's a great turn rate but a horrible category sales figure.

You're heading the right direction, but it's like steering a little bit while trying to turn your car. You run over the curb, wipe out a mailbox and run over a disabled minority. It doesn't work so well.

An Example Continues

So you add a few more titles to the more popular RPGS. You add secondary titles, including the most recent releases. You add 5-6 titles for what your distributor tells you are good-selling titles, add a couple of titles of newer or lesser-known games and pick up a few more one-shots. You start thinking about carrying a selection of dice and order a few sets-maybe one of each color of the latest fancy pattern. Your inventory expands to 50-75 different titles. You probably don't carry more than one of anything, unless it's the D&D Players Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide. You have $1,200 or so invested in your non-D&D RPGs now.

Sales continue to climb, but the entire category doesn't get much of your time. At $5,000 to $10,000 a year, you're still only selling 2-10 titles per week.

An Example Grows

At this point, you roll up your sleeves and look at the sales you want and the resources you have to spend. Looking at sales records and consulting with crew and customers, you can identify the three or four game lines that seem the most promising. Fill those out. Get all the evergreen titles and everything released in the past two or three months. If the game line is reasonable, you might want to order one of everything. Some of those titles will have outlived their usefulness, but at this level, you don't expect that they'll all sell. They will contribute to your customer perception, and so they'll indirectly affect your sales just by being on the shelf.

Counting your expanding accessories line, you might have $5,000 tied up at this point. Your sales probably grow to something like $10-$20,000 per year.

An Example Blooms

Sales are growing, but notice that your turn rate has decreased. In fact, it has probably decreased to the point where it has the lowest turn rate of any major category in the store. It's a dangerous time. You might be tempted to declare the whole thing a failure.

Now let's push it over the top.

Add some minor RPGs that nobody else in the region carries. Merchandise your RPG section with some department signage to identify games by manufacturer or by category. You know how magazines use oversized pull-quotes in a block of text to bring attention to a particular quote? Do something similar with a game by placing them in a different fixture. Osprey Books used to offer free spinner racks with the purchase of a certain number of books. When they changed the style of spinner racks they used, I re-branded the old ones for Palladium's Rifts and other games; the paperback titles fit perfectly on the racks, and it set Palladium apart from the rows of other games.

Expand your accessory section to include every kind of dice imaginable. Move your RPG section to premier positioning in the store; even if you move it back in two or three months, it'll benefit from the foot traffic.

You might build your inventory up to $10,000 in this effort.

Sometime during this last expansion, your category approaches its critical mass. Several things happen at that point. Maintaining sales becomes easier. You notice that people come into the store looking specifically for RPGs-something your store wasn't known for before. Curiously, your top sellers might gain market share in sales, even while their presence in the store shrinks in comparison. The reason? Those players like shopping in a store with good selection even if they never take advantage of it. Strange how people think, isn't it?

The combined benefits of reaching critical mass with your inventory begin to pay off. Your turn rate for the category increases again as the sum total of your inventory becomes more productive than the sum of its parts.

The Usual Caveats

These numbers are based vaguely on real sales records. Use them for comparison only, and take into consideration that I'm making certain assumptions about overall sales volume, store size, traffic count, advertising and marketing, and lots of other factors according to a certain business model. Don't use them as a blueprint for your own plans without adaptation to your specific needs.